Blog - Spooky Squid Gameshttps://spookysquid.com/blog/Sun, 13 Aug 2017 20:06:54 +0000en-GBSite-Server v6.0.0-18123-18123 (http://www.squarespace.com)Russian Subway Dogs - GIF dump #3!Russian Subway DogsMiguel SternbergSun, 13 Aug 2017 20:33:34 +0000https://spookysquid.com/blog/2017/8/12/e35pwuwf8zf7av79cme5wi8g19x6yf534da481e4b0de6fe45c8373:534f70c6e4b0c2d6c892b63d:598f6a4ee58c6284b297799bIt's time again for a big Russian Subway Dogs GIF dump, collecting progress
animations from our twitter and giving them a bit more context. Lots of
polish, new features, and funny bugs to check out!
We're also taking Russian Subway Dogs on tour this summer, hitting Devcom
and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany as well as PAX West in Seattle, USA. More
info at the bottom of the post!
If you're a journalist attending any of these events and want to preview
the game and learn more about Russian Subway Dogs give us a shout. It's time again for a big Russian Subway Dogs GIF dump, collecting progress animations from our twitter and giving them a bit more context. Lots of polish, new features, and funny bugs to check out!

We're also taking Russian Subway Dogs on tour this summer, hitting Devcom and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany as well as PAX West in Seattle, USA. More info at the bottom of the post!

If you're a journalist attending any of these events and want to preview the game and learn more about Russian Subway Dogs give us a shout.

Now on to the GIFs,WARNING: there are a lot of them so it may take some time to load!

New Wildlife: Subway Elks!

Bears and elk can both stun each other resulting in some fun interactions.

Elk will also stun each other if they collide! This still needs a nice impact effect to really sell it.

Like all wildlife elk will get buffed up if they eat power ups. Here an elk has flaming antlers from eating hot sauce. The orange particle effects is our old buff effect, as you'll see below we've now replaced it with a palette cycle.

Our newest wildlife addition is the mighty Subway Elk. These appear rearing at the side of the screen and if they aren't stopped in time will run across the platform, stunning or eliminating everything in their path. From a game design perspective they also act as a great way for us to clear the stage when things get a bit too packed.

New Commuter & Food: The Fish Wielding Babushka

BAM! That's what you get for barking at old ladies dog!

Because most other commuters keep walking when they see the dog, the babushka looked like she was performing a funky gliding dance when we first imported her into the game.

Uhhhhh....

While most commuters will ignore you if you bark in front of them, babushkas will slam you hard with their fish attack, making them the only commuter that can actively harm you. We will be using this to our advantage in the game's campaign mode to teach players to bark behind commuters and not in front of them. The babushkas' fish are so fresh, you'll need to cook them with a quick vodka explosion before you can eat them.

Coffee Power up and Slow Motion

First crack at slow mo and our pupper is jumping like it's a subway station on the moon!

Interesting dive kick bug caused by triggering slow mo mid jump.

Unlike other buffs, slow mo affects everything on screen, so we had to come up with a full screen effect to convey that.

Experimenting with longer trails... this one was definitely a bit much.

Final effect, including the buff timer icon and pulsing palette animation.

We are currently implementing our second power up, coffee, which causes a bullet-time style slow mo effect when eaten by the player. Eventually it will also boost the speed of any wildlife that eats it. Getting this right has involved a lot of trial and error, and you all reap the benefits in the form of funky dog physics GIFs.

Because this power up affects everything on screen, we came up with a full screen visual effect to clearly signal this. This effect is actually built from a whole bunch of smaller elements:

Flickering blue tint with an additive blend.

Animated speed lines / VHS tracking effect on top and bottom of screen. These are actually just white tiled textures overlaid on top of each other and scrolling at different speeds.

Motion trail ghosting for all affected objects.

Pulsing blue animated palette on the player.

Blue glowing motion trail following the player.

Text Style Updates

New hunger up text. Not only does it look a lot better, but it also uses shapes and colour to mirror the hunger meter at the bottom of the screen that it affects.

While updating the animation for scoring indicators we ended up with this weird perminent scrawl all over the screen.

Previously these score indicators would just move up at a linear rate and fade away. Applying tweens to their motion made the movement nice and snappy.

We've been doing a lot of little updates to the text effects in the game. Most of the sound effects are now in actual Russian, and we've updated the look and animation of others.

Misc Updates and Additions!

New and improved poison effect, including some snappy tweening on the skull and crossbones.

Fire bark buff now has a nice golden pulsing palette animation instead of the weird fire particle effect we were using before. It's now much easier to understand what's happening!

Vodka bottles now rotate as they fly through the air. Notice the changes in speed and direction based on the bottle's movement.

Improved explosion with ray particles. We've actually added a bit more polish to the explosion visuals since this GIF was made.

Along with adding new features, we're constantly polishing and improving the existing art and visual effects.

Vodka bottles now spin in the air, making them easier to make out when lots of other items are flying around. While it may appear that fancy physics are involved, it's all a trick! We started out by drawing a full rotation of the bottle by hand (hardware rotation of pixel art is notoriously ugly.) We then play it forwards or backwards depending on its horizontal direction, and alter the frame rate based on the speed at which it's moving. The result looks really great and has no effect on the player's ability to maneuver the bottle.

One major update has been integrating the Retro Palette Swapper library from the Game Maker Marketplace which lets us do high quality recolours of sprites on the fly, including animated colour effects. Before this we were using Game Maker's built-in Image Blend which essentially does a multiply blend of a colour over top of an existing sprite's colours. This looks ok with light-coloured sprites like poodles, but looks dark and dull when blending our poison purple over darker sprites like the dobermans. Now poisoned animals all have a consistent bright purple that really pops, and buffed up animals have cool pulsing colours. It may seem like a minor change but poison and power ups feel a lot more substantial now!

Russian Subway Dogs Summer Tour 2017!

Gamescom Indie ArenaAugust 22 - 26Cologne, GermanyHall 10.1 Booth A020. We'll be in one of the smaller walls of booths. We're bringing some Russian Subway Dogs and They Bleed Pixels merch and this is the only stop on our tour where we're selling it.

PAX West Indie MEGABOOTHSeptember 1-2Seattle, USAWe're in the Minibooth this time so no big merch table this PAX. Also note we're only showing the first two days so be sure to swing by on the Friday or Saturday, otherwise you'll miss us!

Hello there! I'm Alina, a Toronto-based pixel artist and if you've been following what Spooky Squid Games has been up to lately, you've already seen my art in Russian Subway Dogs!

This weekend I had the pleasure of participating in the 12th annual Toronto Game Jam, my first game jam ever.

Expectations

Some of my expectations of what a game jam might be like had me a little nervous about signing up.

Having been with Spooky Squid Games for almost two years I have learned without any doubt that while game development can be fun and rewarding when things are going well, it has an equal potential to be gruelling and disappointing when something just isn't coming together. Why would full time game devs want the additional stress of developing a side project in three days' time? Or the disappointment of coming up with a promising idea and not finishing it in time?

At the same time, knowing that Russian Subway Dogs had itself started out as a jam game, it didn't make sense to ignore the potential behind rapidly prototyping a game idea. Who knows how far it can go one day! And hey, if it never goes anywhere big, at least you gave it a shot and learned something.

Jamming

Working under the assumption that most finished jam games are mere shadows of the developers’ original ideas, Miguel and I made a point of not planning out too much ahead of time.

Our basic concept was to make a local multiplayer, alien-themed soccer game with a sentient ball. We imagined the ball having a few different behaviours to add an unusual challenge for players, and also thought it would be neat to include a few different power ups that could drastically alter the ball’s behaviour.

I found it very refreshing to rapidly prototype the smallest possible version of our idea in contrast to how we usually work, which involves constructing and following a fully fleshed-out game design document. That's not in any way meant to knock the design document approach - if anything it's necessary for any large project - but it was very nice to get a break from that method.

A quick pixel sketch to establish the style for the game’s playable characters. The one on the upper right was inspired by the boot-shaped McNugget!

I started out by doodling some ideas of what the players might look like. I tried to go as low-resolution as possible in order to simplify animation, but we went even smaller in the end!

To save on animation time and effort, I decided to give the playable characters a squishy bobbing animation that would be used both when they’re idle and “walking”. Miguel made their animation speed up in-game when they were moving and it looks surprisingly good considering how much time we saved on animation!

I also tried to give these sprites a little bit of directionality so that, even though I only made one set of animations, we could flip them horizontally in-game to make them face left and right.

Inspired by Snipperclips, one thing we wanted to experiment with was altering the characters’ facial expressions to give them a bit of personality when they scored. I’m glad we gave it a shot because it made a big difference, even though it meant I didn’t end up with enough time to animate any of the other playable characters.

This was our progress at the end of the second night of TOJam.The squishy “attack” pose is just us reusing the squishiest frame of the bounce animation!

In the end, even though we went in with what we thought was a pretty simple idea, which we then pared down to what we thought to be its most basic, essential iteration, we still ended up having to go even more bare-bones than that! The current version does have a ball with very simple AI, but it does not turn angry, and there are no powerups to push it into.

Having said that, we still came out of this weekend with a small little game that’s fun to play!

Aftermath

Overall this was an extremely positive experience for me. One thing that was very helpful was partnering up with Miguel. Because we’ve been working together at Spooky Squid for almost two years, we definitely had an advantage thanks to already knowing how to work efficiently with each other.

Another big help was using tools that we are already familiar with! While there’s nothing wrong with using a game jam as an opportunity to learn a new language or software [Miguel: I used it as a chance to learn Box2D physics!], I felt I was much happier making stuff with an already established workflow. However, this is absolutely up to individual preference and your learning style!

Even though we didn’t get all of our initial ideas into Blobber Basher, we’re still excited about them and may be adding a few new features within the next few months. You can play the current version of Blobber Basher right now on itch.io.

This weekend was a lovely learning experience for me, and I would like to thank the organizers for all of the time and effort that has gone into making this year’s TOJam happen.

Pay what you want for THEY BLEED PIXELS+ other great indie games!

If you’ve been waiting for They Bleed Pixels to be in a bundle the time has finally come! Pay what you want for TBP plus a bunch of other high rated Steam games now!

ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK SALE!

Grab the They Bleed Pixels OST on Bandcamp for only $2 while the bundle is on!

THEY BLEED PIXELS ON THE DANCE FLOOR by DJ FINISH HIM]]>Clawed Girl and Subway Dog guest appearances!Russian Subway DogsThey Bleed PixelsMiguel SternbergMon, 27 Mar 2017 21:25:54 +0000https://spookysquid.com/blog/2017/3/21/clawed-girl-and-subway-dog-guest-appearances534da481e4b0de6fe45c8373:534f70c6e4b0c2d6c892b63d:58d18f4c6b8f5b67c28bfe3cI'm a big fan of indie game crossovers, from the guest levels in They Bleed Pixels to the playable pups from comics and games in our upcoming game Russian Subway Dogs. So it may come as no small surprise that a couple of our characters are making appearances in other indie games.

Clawed Girl playable in Bleed 2

The excellent Bleed 2 came out last month and among the playable characters is the Clawed Girl from They Bleed Pixels!

The Bleed games share more than a similar title with They Bleed Pixels. Not only did they originate near our HQ in Toronto, Canada, but the creator Ian Campbell also shares our penchant for cute pixel art, a willingness to experiment with novel control schemes, and fast platforming with an emphasis on precision and mobility. If you're a fan of They Bleed Pixels, you owe it to yourself to check out both Bleed games. You can pick up Bleed and Bleed 2 on steam now!

Russian Subway Dog cameo in Ruin of the Reckless

You may know that the Ratcoon enemy from upcoming action roguelike Ruin of the Reckless is playable in Russian Subway Dogs, but our titular Canine will also be appearing in Faux-Operative's new game. The exact nature of the Subway Dog's appearance is still a mystery, and I've been told finding our pupper will be a challenge in itself. Ruin of the Reckless will be available on Steam sometime next month, April 2017 but you can wishlist it right now!

]]>PAX South Russian Subway Dogs StreamRussian Subway DogsMiguel SternbergFri, 17 Feb 2017 17:00:09 +0000https://spookysquid.com/blog/2017/2/17/pax-south-russian-subway-dogs-stream534da481e4b0de6fe45c8373:534f70c6e4b0c2d6c892b63d:58a72a47d2b857ad630d4999During PAX South last month, Miguel was interviewed on the Player.me/Devolver digital stream about Russian Subway Dogs. This is the first gameplay video since the Kickstarter back in September. It really shows how far the game has come and gives a nice little taste of some of the hidden depths and interactions players will discover!

The video should go right into our segment but if not, you'll find it at around 6 hours, 33 minutes in!

Watch live video from DevolverDigital on www.twitch.tv]]>Russian Subway Dogs - GIF dump #2!Russian Subway DogsMiguel SternbergThu, 16 Feb 2017 22:51:38 +0000https://spookysquid.com/blog/2017/1/13/russian-subway-dogs-gif-dump-2534da481e4b0de6fe45c8373:534f70c6e4b0c2d6c892b63d:58795ef115d5db2c4b97744bWe've been past due for another bunch of glorious Russian Subway Dogs
progress GIFs! But first some good news.
Russian Subway Dogs has received an OMDC (Ontario Media Development
Corporation) grant to help with production costs! While it doesn't mean we
have full funding for every aspect of the game it helps a lot and means we
can safely continue working on our odd little doggo game full time! Can't
express how grateful we are for this opportunity!
Second we'll be showing Russian Subway Dogs at PAX East in Boston and a few
events at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. If you're a
journalist attending either event and want to preview the game and learn
more about Russian Subway Dogs give us a shout.
Now on to the GIFs,
WARNING: there are a lot of them so it may take some time to load!We've been past due for another bunch of glorious Russian Subway Dogs progress GIFs! But first some good news.

Russian Subway Dogs has received an OMDC (Ontario Media Development Corporation) grant to help with production costs! While it doesn't mean we have full funding for every aspect of the game it helps a lot and means we can safely continue working on our odd little doggo game full time! Can't express how grateful we are for this opportunity!

Second we'll be showing Russian Subway Dogs at PAX East in Boston and a few events at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. If you're a journalist attending either event and want to preview the game and learn more about Russian Subway Dogs give us a shout.

Now on to the GIFs,WARNING: there are a lot of them so it may take some time to load!

The Many Uses of the Hot Sauce Power Up

KC Green's Question Hound eating hot sauce and barking fire!

Juggling hot sauce ups its multiplier for longer lasting fire barking, or you can let it hit the ground to create a 4x fire hazard.

A rival doberman has eaten the hotsauce, it can now bark fire just like the player!

Bears don't bark, but they do get a a double range fire slash with hot sauce!

Pigeons + hot sauce = fire bombs from above!

Our first power up is hot sauce, granting the subway dog the ability to bark flames! As the gallery shows it also has several other uses, not all of them helpful! Creating a unique effect for every type of wildlife takes time but we think it's worth it for the variety and depth it adds to the game!

Message from the Proletaricat!

Had a lot of fun animating this squash and stretchy talk cycle.

We also have special cat expressions for failure and success. Hoping to get these animated soon!

Success has the flashiest animation, with hand animated shine fx and lot of exagerated tweens.

Once we got missions working we realized we needed a high contrast fast moving effect when the Proletaricat spoke.

Some of the missions "dare" you to perform moves that break your combo or make the game harder in return for big points.

The Proletaricat can now talk to the player, giving tips and, more importantly, little bonus missions during endless play. There's a pretty complex back end behind this, letting us do things like cue up a series of messages, trigger text effects and take over the otherwise random, procedural passenger spawning system to deliver special hand tuned challenges.

They Bleed Pixels Bonus Level

Normal passengers won't be in this level but it's neat that they can still interact with Squidy Things correctly!

After some experimenting we decided this level should centre around bouncing bombs around before they explode.

The They Bleed Pixels level not only has you playing as a demon kitty, but it also adds enemies from They Bleed Pixels and some new twists to the standard gameplay.

This level isn't fully playable in the game yet but it's close!

Dying Now 100% More Stylish and Less Abrupt!

Not only is your little pupper corpse still effected by explosions and bears, but we actually boost the physics a bit!

Up until recently, losing a game was super abrupt. As soon as your health ticked down to zero (it's constantly dropping so you have to keep eating) it would switch to the game over screen. We wanted to not only stay on the game screen after death but also give it some style.

There's actually a lot going on here to give the ending visual impact:

Flash screen white for a few frames

Remove control of character and play a death animation once they hit the ground

Instantly slow down the game speed at the moment of death, then ramp back up to full speed.

Fade in an additive red tint.

Scale in animated "game over" text.

Keep the simulation running throughout and boost impact of any hits to the dog "corpse" (see the second GIF in the gallery).

I'm pretty happy with the results!

New Menus for PAX South

While we aren't ready to do the final title screen yet, we needed something nicer looking for our PAX South demo. Since we also had just added our full roster of playable guest dogs and cats we also needed a start game menu for selecting them.

Misc Updates and Additions!

Some early work for the campaign mode. Clock can count down and warn the players when the final train is arriving.

Cat fans are now covered, the Proletaricat is playable and even meows in Russian!

A recent tweak to the bark physics. When players are on the ground, barks will always angle deflected objects up so that it's easier to juggle them.

We're experimenting with different bark effects to make it clearer at which angle objects will be deflected.

Alina Sechkin's been doing some amazing backgrounds, I felt these mosaics deserved some close ups.

Of course there have also been a ton of little individual additions and tweaks, only some of which are covered here.

Hope you enjoyed this animated overview of what we've been up to! If you want to receive these doggy update GIFs in real time follow us on twitter.

]]>Russian Subway Dogs - GIF dump #2!Russian Subway Dogs - This Month in GIFs - Post Kickstarter CatchupRussian Subway DogsThey Bleed PixelsMiguel SternbergFri, 11 Nov 2016 18:37:28 +0000https://spookysquid.com/blog/2016/11/8/russian-subway-dogs-this-month-in-gifs-october534da481e4b0de6fe45c8373:534f70c6e4b0c2d6c892b63d:58226ddb9de4bb3933759b53I've been posting progress on Russian Subway Dogs pretty regularly on
twitter, but it can be hard to hunt them down if you miss them. I figure
it'd be good to have them all in one place, so what I'm planning on doing
is posting a big gallery round up of all the images approximately once a
month.I've been posting progress on Russian Subway Dogs pretty regularly on twitter, but it can be hard to hunt them down if you miss them. I figure it'd be good to have them all in one place, so what I'm planning on doing is posting a big gallery round up of all the images approximately once a month.

If you've been following the game you know our Kickstarter was unsuccessful despite a lot of really great press and response from fans. I wrote about our future plans in the final backer update and in this great interview from the final days of the campaign on ZAM. We're still sorting out how to continue work on the game and hopefully will have news on that soon. In the meantime check out all these GIFs!

I've added commentary to each image in the gallery and put them in rough chronological order.

Chocolate is Poison for Dogs

While figuring out how the poison particles should look we ended up with these neat purple skull rainbows.

The final particle effect. Sparser, bubbly with additive blending.

The chocolate eating little girl. If she sees the dog she hides it by stuffing it in her mouth.

Example of the dog scaring up chocolate and eating it. Particles showing up properly on everything.

Bears also get poisoned by chocolate (true, google it!). We'll need to eventually find a better way of tinting poisoned animals purple.

One of the major updates we've been working on is adding a poison status effect. Any animal that eats chocolate will become poisoned. Since we're always looking for ways to add more depth to our goofy simulation layer if that animal is not a dog and is roasted with a vodka explosion its meat will also be poisoned.

Dogs and bears really can't eat chocolate, however we're debating internally whether animals that can eat chocolate like pigeons should still get poisoned and then what happens with their meat. Right now we're keeping it simple and consistent.

Pigeons

An early awkward attempt to get a hovering animation by playing with the pigeon's gravity. Eventually got it right using TweenGMS instead.

Testing the player's ability to bark stun pigeons with food.

Early work getting crumb particles to show up. Looks more like crazy vomiting!

Closer to completion. The crumbs are coloured based on the food, but they fade into the background a bit too much.

Final crumbs with thin black outlines to make them stand out. I want to eventually add a burst of these to other animals when they eat.

Our first, possibly only, air foe. I don't know if there are pigeons in the Moscow subway but we definitely have them in the subways here in Toronto. These had a bunch of fun unplanned gameplay effects. Since they take a while to actually eat any food they catch they'll occasionally save you from losing your air combo if you can steal it back in time.

Alternate Player Characters and Guests

The Clawed Kitty, designed for a future They Bleed Pixels themed level.

Clawed Kitty portrait

The player will be able to unlock and play as several alternate dogs, casts and other critters including guests from other games and comics. These even have unique "barks".

Misc Polish

Dogs now open their mouths when barking and when food is near. It's a small touch but it adds a lot of character.

Hot food now smokes black briefly before crumbling to ash. Before this it wasn't always clear why it had disappeared.

New pause menu!. The slick animations are driven by the TweenGMS tween engine.

More tween magic driving the animated subways. We fade in a motion blurred version of the train based on it's speed.

Finally some of the smaller touches we've been working on. We also added a whole bunch of new stations and improved the background artwork for the existing ones. You can see those on the Russian Subway Dogs webpage screenshot gallery.

Several of this weeks updates used TweenGMS a great free library for tweening animations in Game Maker Studio. If your looking to add tweens to your game I recommend both GMS and the slightly more feature rich TweenLine which is reasonably priced. We went with TweenGMS because at the time TweenLine didn't support a few key features around rooms and permanence. Those issues have been fixed since (the dev is super active and responsive to feedback) and I can happily recommend either. You'll be seeing more slick UI animations in the future now that we have easy access to tweening.

I tweeted the above thoughts on Breath of The Wild after watching waaaaay too many hours of the Nintendo E3 Live Stream. Someone on Facebook asked me to elaborate, so here are my thoughts with a bit more unpacking.

So Looking Glass Studios were the originators of the first person simulation genre with games like the original System Shock, Thief I & II, Ultima Underworld, etc.. A lot of the games that continued in that vein were made by ex-Looking Glass folks, the first Deus Ex, Bioshock, Dishonoured, etc. These games tend to try to simulate a lot of interesting interactions and prize player agency in creating their own solutions to problems. Enemies also tend to have more complex AI, with some simple emotional states and awareness of the world. However they can suffer from sticking too closely to reality, simulating things that just aren’t interesting and doing a lot of things but doing none of them particularly well (EG stealth in the original Deus Ex was an option but was terrible in practice).

Nintendo design tends toward elegant simplicity, they’ll build a game around a small number of mechanics and execute them really well, exploring a lot of the possible uses for them and making sure everything works well. Nothing is in there that doesn’t need to be. If there is a lot of content it usually doesn’t interact in as many ways as it would in a Looking Glass style game. Nintendo tend to focus on gameplay first rather than worrying about realism or coherent worlds. Puzzles often have a single solution and will sometimes block the player from using their own creative solutions (invisible walls in late stage Majora’s Mask dungeons I’m looking at you!).

Both of these philosophies have strengths and weaknesses but what’s great about the mix in the new Zelda (based on what I’ve seen) is that they’re working together to make something with the strengths of both while removing the weaknesses. There’s some super robust simulation stuff going on but none of it feels needless or out of place. It’s not overly concerned with making these simulations realistic, so they can exaggerate them to create better, more interesting gameplay (EG spicy food protects you from the cold, carrying a metal sword increases your chance of being hit by lightning in a storm) and it has the level of gameplay polish and “game feel” you expect from Nintendo.

A good example of a moment in the stream that felt pure Looking Glass style emergent gameplay was Link cutting some saplings to make sticks in a gale force wind. The wind carried the sticks into and through a campfire, setting them alight. The sticks then blew into a field of dry grass that caught fire and quickly spread, alerting a nearby encampment of enemies.

Zelda has flirted with emergent stuff for a long time but it’s never been this coherent and all encompassing, tending towards small one off touches that don’t interconnect above a certain level.

Fun side note. Looking Glass’s best, or at least most elegant games were probably Thief I & II, for which the designers have mentioned being highly influenced by Nintendo’s approach to design. __________________________________________________________In other news we’re Kickstarting a new game “Russian Subway Dogs” soon!

We've had this localized version in the works with the Playism folks for a while now, but have been waiting for the Crimson Update to be complete before going forward. I worked closely with Playism, picking appropriate Japanese fonts and altering layouts to work with them and I'm honestly quite proud of the results. I think we really managed to incorporate the translated text while preserving the original typography and design, which can be a tricky balance.

It's been an interesting process. The Japanese character sets are very different from English. Not only are most words shorter but many characters are denser, more complex and have more curves and less straight lines then the roman character set. This creates a unique challenge given much of our text layout in They Bleed Pixels was built around a blocky pixel font and a thin flowing art nouveau script.

The solution I decided on is a mix of finding a good blocky Japanese font with a similar weight and (where it's appropriate) leaving the original English in and incorporating the Japanese text as a design element. A trick I borrowed from some of the better visual localization I've seen in manga and anime translated in the other direction. I've included a bunch of screenshots from both versions of TBP in this post for comparison.

Japanese media has been a major influence on my art so it's been really amazing to see the reaction from fans in Japan over the last few years, some of whom I've been lucky enough to meet in person at Tokyo Game Show and Comitia. Not to mention the amazing fan art and let's play videos they've produced! I hope this localization encourages them to give it another play-through and introduces a whole new audience to the game.

Big thanks to the fine folks at Playism for their work localizing the text and spotting all the places where we messed up entering it into the game! I also want to the thank the Japanese fan(s) who created the unofficial translation patch that this translation replaces. There was a long period where that was the only way to play the game in Japanese. I know there are many players who were introduced to They Bleed Pixels through their work. If you're reading this, hats off!

For English speaking players this Playism version is also the first version available completely DRM free with zero Steam integration. If that's important to you or you hate online leaderboards for some reason you can now buy this version and still get a Steam key with all the bells and whistles!

Also this week the folks at We Love Fine dropped a new They Bleed Pixels shirt featuring art by graphic designer Charles Noard! You can pick it up in both unisex and women's fitted styles in a range of colours.

If you bought and enjoyed They Bleed Pixels or another game on this list at a discount we’d encourage you to buy a gift copy for a friend at full price if you can afford to.

We all love getting games at a discount so why is it important to buy full price when you can? Because when prices get too low (as they are now) indie game development becomes unsustainable. That means less risks taken, less experimentation, less games that cater to a particular niche and less indie games in general.

You definitely won’t get big updates years after a game comes out like our recent Crimson Update for They Bleed Pixels

You may not even get those few rare big indie hits that make serious money! Many of the hit game you’ve played were not the first games made by those creators and they could only happen because their early games had some moderate success.

No one is making indie games because they want to strike it rich. Were doing this because we love games and we love making them. But we do need to make a working wage to keep doing what we do and making the games you love.

The long wait is over for Mac and Linux users, They Bleed Pixels is now available for your OS of choice! All three operating systems are also getting the brand new Crimson Update free! More levels, more polish, more blood!

As an extra bonus They Bleed Pixels is 75% off for the next week (June 3-10th)!

While the Crimson Update is free for everyone, its existence came at a terrible cost, documented in our new live action trailer, a collaboration with photographer Paul Hillier.

Crimson Update Features:

New engine rewritten in C for 60fps gameplay on netbooks and older computers.

Shorter and easier Novice Difficulty levels.

New bonus levels! Winter’s End and exp. 666.

Record, play and share your best runs on the leaderboards. Watch the top players to improve your runs!

Enhanced blood effects! Double the blood particles!

Support for both DirectInput and XInput controllers.

Lots of other little bits of polish, from save games to graphics options.

We're super happy to announce that pixel artist Alina Sechkin will be joining our team full time starting today! An alumni of Toronto'sDMGprogram, Alina Sechkin's pixel art appears in Will O’Neill's Actual Sunlight and Necrosoft's upcoming gameOh, Deer!as well as at the DPAD2 game culture exhibition.

She's helping out on our yet be announced next big game and will basically double our art output. Which means you can expect a whole bunch more pretty pixels in the new game! °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

You may have noticed our website has had a major overhaul and is full up to date information (gasp!) .

After an almost five year hiatus (ahhh!) we final have a development Blog again. We basically went devblog silent for the entire production of They Bleed Pixels and the upcoming free They Bleed Pixels - Crimson Update. We're moving onto the next big project and so this silence ends now! That said, till we officially announce our new project, we will be vague. Probably also inconsistently updated. Let that be our motto for the new blog: "inconsistent and vague".

The entries you see below are taken from our tumblr and our old Guerrilla Gardening Development blog. Speaking of Guerrilla Gardening : Seeds of Revolution the new website now includes a memorial archive for that now mothballed project. Lots of information on the development of the game, why we shelved it and some never released pre-production artwork.

For fans of They Bleed Pixels we now have a much more extensive fan art gallery including a section for cosplay photographs and videos. Expect some new wallpapers when the Crimson Update drops as well.

More 1bit visual effects experiments. Messing specifically with healing status effects this time. I did the three on the right first, trying different dissolves. The one on the left takes my favourite dissolve and uses a quick stretch and squash intro to make it appear first.

The bottom image is a test with a sprite I had lying around. I added a single pixel drop shadow to the bottom of the effect and really like how it adds a bit of depth and volume without messing with the simple flatness of the effect.

Some 1bit pixel art visual effect experiments from last night. Working on finding some good techniques that don’t rely on colour or shading to sell the effect. The bottom one is inspired by a hand drawn 2D lightning effect in this Kyary Pamyu Pamyu video.

Update: Added a pink smoke poof also inspired by the 2D animations in that Kyary Video.

Seriously folks, seeing people dress up as the Clawed Girl from They Bleed Pixels keeps blowing me away! I feel like it’s on of the highest complements to have someone take the time and effort to create a costume and dress up as your character. So Great!

Remember the great They Bleed Pixels piece from the Indie Ape show in San Francisco? Well you now have a chance to own a copy! We’ve made arrangements with the artist to do a limited run of fifty signed and numbered prints*!

]]>Playing with riskThey Bleed PixelsMiguel SternbergThu, 31 Jul 2014 17:18:46 +0000https://spookysquid.com/blog/playing-with-risk534da481e4b0de6fe45c8373:534f70c6e4b0c2d6c892b63d:548be280e4b0cb3cc9f726acHere's an interesting tumblr post on how both Shovel Knight and They Bleed Pixels add elements of risk and reward to checkpoints. I wasn’t aware of Shovel Knights’ checkpoint destruction for cash system till reading this. Great to see other game devs experimenting with systems that integrate checkpoints and saving into the gameplay in a meaningful way. There’s a lot of unexplored territory there.

By the way, our friend Mathew Kumar who originally suggested the They Bleed Pixels checkpoint system has an upcoming game called Knight & Damsel in the works folks may want to check out. He also designed a particularly devious They Bleed Pixels guest level coming in the next update.